John Grisham - The Whistler

He put on a pair of tight rubber gloves and checked to make sure both front and rear doors were locked. He could now take his time. There were two bedrooms. The large one was obviously used by the owner; the smaller had a set of cheap bunk beds. Delgado knew the woman lived alone. She was forty-three years old and divorced, no children. He went through two chests of drawers and found nothing but clothing. Same in the closets and in the two bathrooms. In her small, cluttered home office he found a desktop computer and a printer sitting on a set of low-slung file cabinets. Slowly, methodically, he went through every drawer, every file, every sheet of paper.

–

There was a man in her house! JoHelen Hooper tapped her iPhone. The home security app alerted her that her system had been disarmed at 9:44, two minutes earlier. She tapped again and found the footage. The camera hidden in the ceiling fan of the den caught him as he shuffled by, headed for the rear. White, male, age about forty, with a goofy red shirt and cap, pretending to be someone else. The camera hidden in the air vent above her bed caught him as he entered her room and began carefully going through her drawers. He touched everything.

She swallowed hard and tried to maintain her composure. She was sitting less than twenty feet from Judge McDover, in the main courtroom in Sterling, waiting as a group of harried lawyers huddled by the jury box and tried to make decisions. Thankfully, there was no jury; Her Honor was only hearing motions.

In front of JoHelen was her steno writer on its tripod stand. On her table was a notepad, some paperwork, and her iPhone, which she tried to look at casually without seeming alarmed. Alarmed! There was a man in her house slowly going through her underwear. Now he’s closing that drawer and moving to the one below it.

A lawyer started speaking and JoHelen began recording. It was a worthless hearing in a meaningless case and if she missed a word here or there she could always check the audiotape. Her mind was spinning and she was terrified, but she stared at the lawyer, focused on his lips, and tried to concentrate. The app would record all footage from the four cameras hidden in her home, so she would miss nothing when she reviewed it during lunch.

Be calm, be cool, look bored as you capture their legal gibberish at two hundred words a minute. After eight years of flawless court reporting she could almost do it in her sleep. Sleep, though, would now be another issue.

Her big moment had finally arrived. For the past week, Her Honor had tipped her hand with her abrupt change of temperature. Never known to be warm and fuzzy, she had always been pleasant and professional with JoHelen, and they had enjoyed each other’s company as they often gossiped and laughed about things that happened in court. They were not close friends, because Claudia was too aloof for ordinary relationships. She saved her attentions for Phyllis Turban, a person JoHelen knew well but by reputation only.

Since the day the officials from BJC arrived and handed over the complaint, Claudia had not been herself. She had been edgier, somewhat distant, as if distracted and worried. Normally, she kept her emotions on an even keel and was not given to moods. Lately, though, and especially in the past few days, she had been short and abrupt with JoHelen, and even tried to avoid her, while at the same time trying to gloss over her feelings with a phony smile and the occasional pandering comment. For eight years, the two women had spent almost every working day in the same room. JoHelen knew something had changed.

What about the alarm? It was a new system with monitors on every window and door, installed by Cooley two months earlier. To bypass it meant the guy in the red shirt and cap was a professional.

A brief pause as the lawyer looked for a piece of paper, and JoHelen glanced at her phone. Her intruder could barely be seen in her closet, rifling through her wardrobe. Should she call the police and bust the guy? Should she call Neighborhood Watch? No-calls leave trails, and these days it seemed as if most trails were leading back to JoHelen.

Two lawyers were suddenly talking at once, something that happened every day in her world, and she deftly separated the two on the official record without missing a word. Her only real pet peeve was when three lawyers were talking simultaneously. A simple glance from her to the bench and Judge McDover would restore order. They often communicated with slight movements of the face or hands, but today JoHelen was trying not to look at her boss.

The intruder would find nothing incriminating. She wasn’t stupid enough to hide records in a place so easy to find. Her records were elsewhere, locked and secure. But what would they do next? They had killed a man to intimidate and impede the investigation by BJC. Evidently, they had tracked down Greg Myers and silenced him. Now Cooley, her friend, confidant, handler, and co-conspirator, was either leaving or already gone, freaking out and seemingly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He assured her she was safe, that her identity would never be revealed, but those were hollow words from last week.

Her Honor called for a ten-minute recess, and JoHelen calmly walked down the hall to her small office, where she locked the door and watched, in real time, her intruder. The man was still in her house, now going through the kitchen drawers, carefully removing the pots and pans and then replacing them just as he found them. He was not a thief and would not leave a trail. He was wearing gloves. He finally made his way to her office, where he took a seat and looked around. He began removing files from her drawers as if he had all the time in the world.

He worked for Vonn Dubose. And they now suspected her.

–

Allie Pacheco stopped by at noon for an update. They met in Geismar’s office, at the worktable cluttered with files of other pending cases. Allie wasn’t smug when he talked about their success with Clyde Westbay, but he was obviously proud of their work. And, the best was yet to come.

All of their requests for wiretapping and surveillance had been approved by a federal judge, and their tech team was listening to dozens of phones. The FBI had located the homes of Vance and Floyd Maton, Ron Skinner, and Hank Skoley, four of the five Cousins. Their boss, Mr. Dubose, was currently living in a cottage in Rosemary Beach. The night before, Hank had driven Vonn to a swanky restaurant near Panama City where they met a third man, a guy who just happened to be a Brunswick County supervisor. The purpose of the meeting was not clear and the FBI was not eavesdropping.

Dubose still had them baffled. They were now in agreement that the name had to be fictitious, and that he had done a marvelous job for the past thirty or forty years living as someone else. As to bloodlines, the past was murky. Given the moral vagaries of their ancestors, it was proving to be difficult ascertaining the degree to which the Cousins were actually related. But this mattered only in their search for Vonn’s real identity.

Clyde gave them the names of seven other managers. So far, the FBI had identified almost thirty bars, restaurants, hotels, shopping centers, strip clubs, liquor stores, convenience stores, residential developments, gated communities, and golf courses believed to be managed by the eight men, including Clyde. Every single entity was owned by an offshore company, most registered in Belize, the Bahamas, or the Cayman Islands.

Their investigation was expanding by the hour. Their boss in Jacksonville was committing all the manpower and resources Tallahassee was asking for. Luna, Pacheco’s supervisor, had dropped everything and was running the operation. The U.S. Attorney’s Office had four lawyers tag teaming with the FBI.